Our own endurance challenge has opened our eyes to the importance of sustainability in bikes, phones, chocolate, clothes, dragon fruit, toilets… as well as the wider ubiquitous and all important issues of deforestation and drought.

Wonderful people, careful drivers, and very few hills: after over a month of ‘holiday’ where we cycled only about 200km we needed to make up some miles and Malaysia was the perfect place to do this. We chose the west coast as it was a shorter distance, better weather and less touristy. In fact, between Malacca and Penang we didn’t see another westerner...

The most expensive gateways to Asia and good models of benign dictatorship? A short blog about the start of our Asian adventures where the most shocking things were the amount of building work and how much money we spent! After four months in Africa where we usually got by on a few dollars a day (apart from visas and a few touristy things), we were very upset!

South Africa is a country of huge contrasts; the richest and the poorest living in very close proximity, terrible stories of violent crime yet very kind and generous people and we did not have any problems at all in the six weeks we were travelling through. Politcally and economically, comparisons are currently being made to Zimbabwe. We hope that it does not go the same way...

Beyond the Bike in Zimbabwe can be summed up with the following: desperation and hope, education, cricket, rocks, sand, gold mines, lions and rhinos. We only spent a week in Zim which is a great shame as it is such an interesting country but we had to keep moving to make Durban (and the test match for Stu!) for Christmas.